


So Leave me Here and Call me Lucky

by lc2l



Category: Jumper (2008)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 20:58:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lc2l/pseuds/lc2l
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The average lifespan of a jumper is six and a half years.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	So Leave me Here and Call me Lucky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).
  * Translation into Deutsch available: [Und sag bloß nicht, ich hätte Glück gehabt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/329281) by [ibangmyowndrum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ibangmyowndrum/pseuds/ibangmyowndrum)



> Thanks to The Blue Ninja for reading, encouraging and betaing. <3
> 
> Dear recipient: You may be interested to know that there is a published book called 'Griffin's Story' about Griffin's life as a child. I wasn't sure if you'd read it and I've lost my copy somewhere so I took a few ideas from it but didn't treat it as canon. Hope you enjoy the fic, and happy Yuletide!

The average lifespan of a jumper is six and a half years. Considering the first jump happens at five, this means on average a jumper can only know they're a jumper for one and a half years.

Children are easier to kill than adults. They're too weak to fight back, they've been to so few places the paladins can predict their every jump.

Griffin was lucky. Lucky his Mum once took him with her when she visited her lover Karl, lucky she hid her tracks so well the paladins didn't know about the cottage in the hills, lucky he was left alone in Karl's living room for so long he knew every inch of it like no other place.

He was lucky that when he stepped into his parent's kitchen to see a dark figure and a dripping blade, to hear his mother scream "Griffin, run!" Karl's living room was the first place he thought of, the place he appeared in an instant later.

He was lucky Karl loved conspiracy theories and kept him hidden until he was twelve before getting a job on a cruise ship and taking him to find jump sites all over the world. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

***

They practiced on the ship at night, when Karl took the night watch and the crew were all asleep. Griffin would jump back and forth across the deck—experimenting with maintaining and losing momentum. He could jump off the side of the ship and plummet three meters before jumping back onto the deck stationary, or he could start a punch on one end of the ship and finish it at the other with all the speed conserved.

There were three rules for jumping on the cruise ship. They were on the first page of the sketchbook where he kept drawings of all the jump sites Karl made him memorize at every port, they were etched roughly into the wooden panels beside the hammock where he slept, he recited them every morning over breakfast before he was allowed on deck.

Rule one: No jumping in populated areas. Karl's theory was that paladins could sense jumps—how else could someone track a group who can be anywhere at any time?—so it would make sense to station an agent in every city or town just to be on the lookout. At the time they had no idea how many paladins there were, so they played it safe—no jumping within five miles of a population centre with over one thousand people.

Rule two: No jumping where anyone can see. That counted for leaving and arriving. General rule: 'if you don't know the place you're jumping to is deserted, don't jump.'

Rule three: No jumping to land unless the ship is at least ten leagues from the nearest shore. "Because if anything happens, Griff," Karl said. "You need to be able to jump somewhere safe."

"Yes, because I'm a terrible villainous jumping affront to nature," Griffin said, paraphrasing every insult hurled at him by every paladin who had ever been close enough to track him down. He'd always jumped as soon as they found him, but sometimes they got their accusations in early. "And this ship is my secret lair."

"You're not a villain, Griffin," Karl said, passing over the list of that day's chores. "Don't let them turn you into one."

***

He wonders—when he's conscious and aware of something that isn't hunger or pain—what happened to David. The paladins haven't tracked Griffin down yet, either, so maybe David succeeded. Or maybe they figure Griffin is either dead, dying or long gone.

Either way, it's clear enough that David isn't coming back and 'dying' sums up Griffin's situation best. Killing people is wrong but leaving them hooked up to an electric current with no food, water or escape is completely okay.

And then there's the girl, did she make it? If David saved her—how many times has Griffin left a place without looking back because he knows there's no hope and he's tired of seeing Roland standing over the corpses of the people he loves?

He doesn't think about what Karl would've said about the bomb. He doesn't think about what Karl would've said about a lot of things.

If it wasn't for the paladins, Karl would still be able to say them, after all.

***

He came onboard in Nepal. Griffin was chopping vegetables in the galley with Karl and he watched through the window as the passengers came aboard—the normal mix of young couples, families with small children, people desperate to do something with their lives before they were too old and him. He had dark skin, black hair and surveyed the empty deck with an expression far too serious for the start of a summer cruise.

His eyes turned to the window of the galley and Griffin felt the heavy weight of dark eyes upon him. His blood ran cold and his hands shook.

Karl leant over to tug the knife out of Griffin's hands. "Are you okay?"

The man's gaze swept on and it was as though Griffin had been released—he fell forward against the counter and breathed slowly, trying to pull his thoughts into order. "There's a man."

Karl frowned and stepped up beside him, peering through the window to the group. "Did you recognise him? Has he been here before?"

Griffin shook his head because the image of the man emblazoned on his mind's eye isn't familiar in context, he's never seen that on this ship before. Those eyes, that posture, the way his hand shifts on the handle of the black case he's dragging behind him. "I don't remember," he said, and when he looked down at his hands they were clenched so tight on the counter that his knuckles were turning white.

Karl touched his shoulder lightly. "Maybe he's been on the boat before, and you have bad memories of that," he said, although it was clear from the tone and the fact that he hadn't moved his hand away that he didn't believe it for a moment.

Griffin held the counter tighter—like he was using it as an anchor to stop himself jumping as far away as he could possibly get. "I was five," he said. "I don't even remember it."

"Sometimes," Karl said. "The body remembers things that the mind chooses to forget." His hand slid off Griffin's shoulder as he turned away. "I'll speak to the Captain, see if we can get him put back on land and the boat out in the ocean."

Griffin didn't need to see his face to know how unlikely that was. "If they found the ship once—"

"I know." Karl hesitated in the doorway. "You should pack a bag, be ready to leave."

*

Griffin packed his sketchbook, clean underwear, a clean T-shirt and then stared at all the empty space at the top of the rucksack. At sixteen other people had stuff, didn't they? They had books or toys or—he couldn't even think of anything. Karl had always been so adamant about them being ready to leave at a moment's notice. 'Don't keep anything you can't carry.'

Griffin looked around the cabin then broke one of the small carved anchors off the wall and threw it in on top of his clothes, zipping it up and swinging it onto his back.

Karl should've been back by then. Maybe Griffin had been wrong and the man had been completely innocent, just some passing similarities to a guy Griffin could hardly remember.

He waited a beat longer then stood up and headed out the door. The Captain's cabin was on the other side of the ship. It would take five minutes to walk there—five minutes during which time Karl could be another drop of blood on a stained silver—

Griffin didn't even finish the thought before jumping the length of the ship. The corridor outside the cabin was empty and the door was shut which at this time of day meant fuck all. Griffin pressed up against it and closed his eyes trying to listen.

The door opened and he stumbled through it into the sights of a gun.

"Hello Griffin," said the black man with a silenced black handgun pointed directly at Griffin's head. "I'm Roland," he smiled and it made Griffin's skin crawl. "I was just thinking how long it's been since I last saw you."

Griffin shivered and tried to focus on somewhere—anywhere—the deck of the ship, the old house in the mountains but his brain was scrambled and there was a _gun._

"Griffin!" Griffin's head snapped around to see Karl slumped at the edge of the room, pressing the heel of his palm against his leg. There was red, red on his trousers, on his hands, pooling on the floor. "Jump!"

In spite of the silencer, the gunshot was louder than anything Griffin had ever imagined. The cabin seemed to echo with it until his ears rang and his hands shook and he wasn't dead—he touched his hands to his chest, his face and they came away clean.

He looked up in time to see Karl list to the side. The bullet hole was a dark circle in the centre of his head, two thin streams coming out down the bridge of his nose.

Karl was too far away to reach and the gun was moving slowly through the air to point at Griffin and Karl was _bleeding_. Griffin did the only thing he could think to do. He took a step back, pressed both hands against the cabin door and jumped.

*

He'd jumped a skidoo, a car, even a lorry once for practice but that had been something of a strain. Karl had said at the time—'in a high pressure situation, adrenaline will let you do things you would normally find impossible.

The ship dropped into a hospital parking lot at night in Manchester, England. The metal slams into the concrete ground and the boat buckles, sending everyone in the room flying. The gun went off and Griffin felt a sharp burning pain across the side of his neck.

He dived across the tilting floor, snatching at Karl's wrist as Roland grabbed his gun again. By the time he'd got it up, Griffin had gone.

Griffin opened his eyes. He was kneeling on the floor of an old room, surrounded on three sides by dust covered sofas and the cloud of dust that came up from the mat when they landed on it. The television in the corner had been switched off for four years.

He released Karl's wrist slowly and stood up, taking in the grime covered windows, the photo frames on the mantelpiece where he could just about see the outline of himself as a child, or the single photo of Karl and his mother.

He stepped into the hallway—sending up tiny spirals of dust with every footstep—and saw the pile of mail sitting half a meter high on the hall carpet, the stained floorboards and ceiling where the pipes had dripped until the bills had gone unpaid long enough that the water was shut off.

In the bathroom he found a sealed pack of gauze and tore it open, bundling up a whole handful to press against his neck.

He went back downstairs, back into the living room. The blood had already stopped flowing from the body on the floor. There would be no last words, no touching farewell.

"Thank you," Griffin said, and jumped.

***

Griffin grits his teeth against the electricity pulsing through his body and tries not to black out again.

He's twenty four. If he dies today, he's lived eighteen years longer than the average.

Griffin licks sweat off his top lip and tries to brace himself against the metal so the wires stop cutting into his arms. The next electric shock throws him off balance and he drops back down—wires digging even deeper into his arms.

He once met a jumper who was fifty seven. An old man who survived by never jumping—walking from place to place and playing the normal human for all it was worth. If Griffin hadn't tracked him down, no one would ever have found him.

If Griffin skews the statistics at twenty four, how much would a fifty seven year old change the average? Enough that most jumpers die a week or two after their first jump?

***

His hands trembled—arthritis, he'd said, with a smile like being old enough for arthritis was the greatest gift in the world—as Roland pulled the chains tighter, his skin turning white as he was pressed against the wall.

His name was Edward, Griffin remembered from his research. He'd been a ghost in the paladin's system—hidden for so many years. Griffin had followed the faintest brush of decades old jump scars from France to Australia and finally to Prague to find his house, never looking back to see Roland right behind.

Edward's eyes were still sharp, following Roland pacing across the room as he unwrapped a sleek dagger from a white cloth. "You think after all these years," he said. "I would let you be the one to kill me?"

The chains pulled tight and Griffin pressed against the wall as the whole building shook—plaster flaking from the walls and light fittings swinging from side to side.

Griffin could jump a car or a bus and he'd once jumped a boat. He hadn't realised a house was even possible.

The building slumped, like it was settling back on its foundations and Griffin looked over in time to see Edward's head drop limply forward—his body sagging lifelessly against the chains. Apparently a building was too much for anyone to jump.

"Well," Roland turned slowly on the spot, surveying the cracked walls. "If only you all died so easy."

The knife flew through the air and was deep in Griffin's side before he even realised it'd been thrown. Time seemed to slow—there was blood welling up like treacle around the blade. His t-shirt was ruined.

Roland pulled out a small black device—a taser, some vaguely aware part of Griffin's mind provided—and raised it in one hand.

Griffin charged forward and rammed into him, sending them both sprawling to the floor and the taster flying off into the corner of the room. The hilt of the dagger slammed into Roland's stomach, sending the blade deeper into Griffin's chest.

"You. Are. A. Dick." Griffin shouted, accenting each word with a sharp punch to Roland's face.

Roland snarled and grabbed the hilt of the dagger, dragging it through Griffin's body and pulling it out. "You are unnatural," he hissed. "You are a heretic and a sinner and must be purged."

Griffin stared at the dagger dropping bright red blood—remembered so many other daggers and so many other people and always _this man_ and _this smile_ like a wolf. "Bite me," he snapped, slamming his head into Roland's nose and jumping.

He went to the derelict house in the woods, a takeaway place in Tokyo and a spot in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where there had once been a ship before he managed to pull together enough focus to fall out of the water and into a hospital. The floor cratered around him, seawater flooding the room, and someone shouted something about blood.

***

The sun moves to just the right angle that it glares into his eyes and he closes them for a moment as another pulse of electricity shudders through him.

When he opens his eyes it's dark, the cool night wind soothing against his sunburned cheeks. His stomach lets out a grumble of protest. He's been blacking out for who knows how long. When did he last eat? Crisps back at the lair with videogames and a paladin to dispose of?

Living the high life, huh. He tugs at his wrists and jumps again; visualising the lair, the pyramids, downtown Tokyo.

The electric shock hits him like a punch to the stomach and he slumps weakly against the wires holding him up, rocking back and forth like a child on a swing.

He closes his eyes and lets time pass.

***

The zapper was new. Griffin could feel it against the back of his neck—six tiny barbs which hooked into his flesh to fix it in place so it could send out a sharp electric shock every time he tried to jump.

Instead, he ran. To his left Roland was standing on the back of a land rover with a shotgun, so he ducked through the small rocky canyons, darting from left to right to keep cover.

"Oh Griffin," Roland shouted, over the rushing in Griffin's ears, the car engine and the thudding of footsteps behind him. "Griffin, Griffin, Griffin. Aren't you finding this story a little old?"

Griffin threw one hand back to tug on the zapper and got a shock that sent him rolling forward for his trouble. He landed it, back on his feet in a moment, and was running just in time to hear the bullet hit the rock where his head had just been.

He risked a glance sideways to see Roland reloading. "You get attached to someone," Roland called. "We kill them. You fall apart, make mistakes, we nearly kill you and you escape to start the whole cycle again." The sound of him snapping the gun shut echoed through the mountains. "Aren't you ready to see how it ends?"

"Well," Griffin said, fighting for breath as he vaulted over a rock. "I hear the best stories are the ones that surprise you."

Naturally that would be when his feet landed on a patch of snow and kept going as the ground gave way sending him plummeting into an underground cavern. The hole was three meters wide at best, his legs trapped in the avalanche of snow that had fallen down when he fell. Somewhere, he could hear Roland laughing.

"The one thing I've learnt from all this, Griffin, is that Jumpers are predictable."

The zapper shocked him again, even though he wasn't doing anything. Maybe the snow was affecting it, possibly it didn't like the water. Griffin grabbed a handful of ice and pressed it against the back of his neck.

The light from the opening was blocked for a moment and then someone landed in front of him and a pistol was pressed against his head. If Griffin looked up through crossed eyes he could see the black barrel, could feel it cold against his skin even more so than the ice and snow all around him.

"Hello Griffin," said the woman. Griffin had never got her name, her age. He'd been tracking paladins for five years—he'd seen this one at least twenty seven times and the only thing he knew about her was that she never missed, she never gave up, she never stopped until her prey was dead.

Griffin tried to jump but the feeble shock that flashed through his body was still enough to anchor him in place. "Please," he said, stupidly. He couldn't think, he was wearing shorts and a fucking T-shirt and freezing half to death with electricity frying his brain. "What if I was your son?"

She stared down at him and hesitated— _hesitated—_ long enough for Griffin to try again.

He collapsed on a dusty carpet, face down next to a rotting corpse, shivering and shaking with the sound of a gunshot echoing in his ears.

She missed. She _missed._ He mentioned her son and she _missed._

That was worth investigating. A jumper with a paladin for a mother—he might even be still alive.

***

Roland arrives in a pick-up truck. Griffin can hardly turn his head to look down and meet Roland's eyes. He's too out of it for surprise or the familiar shiver of revulsion. All he gets, as Roland smirks a self-satisfied smile, is a shadow of acceptance and inevitability.

"Your friend," Roland says, wrapping a chain as high on the pylon as he can reach. "Is not very good at tying up loose ends." He climbs back into the truck and drives forward, the chain pulling taught between the vehicle and the pylon. The truck strains for a moment, then the pylon falls.

Griffin hears his arm crack as his perch slams heavily into the ground. The wires snap and whiplash across his cheeks and a shard of metal drives further into his leg.

Roland walks towards him, slowly pulling the familiar cloth off the far too familiar silver dagger. "Now me, I pride myself on it."

Griffin inches his leg down, feeling the metal slide slowly out of his flesh. Through chapped lips it hurts to talk, but he has to delay the end somehow. "He's still alive then?"

Roland waves this off with one hand. "Not for much longer," he says. "Though he will outlive you, I suppose." He crouches down, the knife poised over Griffin's chest and when he speaks there's almost a sense of nostalgia to it. "And there I was thinking you and I would be doing this dance forever."

Griffin gives his leg one last pull and it slides free of the metal embedded in it. "Any time you want to give up," he says as the last electrical pulses shudder through his body to the ground. "Go ahead."

And as the blade drops towards his chest, he jumps.

***

The average life span of a human is seventy years.

Lucky would be not being a jumper at all.


End file.
